Yeah, the headline doesn't parse. The verb is "downs," it seems, but they're not taking anything down.
My thought on this initiative was that it reminded me of the Google system of personal projects, expect coordinated across the entire company.
I like the idea though.
I really like the idea too, at my last job there was a lot of discussion for a while about taking 4 hours each week to work on whatever you wanted and present it to the group at the next team meeting. It never really panned out, at least not officially.